Yet Brown was something more than a hard-boiled sailor initiating a green youngster. One Sunday afternoon the pair took a walking trip to Eglinton Wood, where under the inspiring influence of a spot associated with the memory of Sir William Wallace Burns confided to his mentor that he occasionally tried to write poetry. He was already poet enough to have a copy in his pocket. Brown listened, and declared that verses of such merit ought to be sent to a magazine. It was actually this, Burns recorded long afterwards, that first gave him the idea that he might amount to something as a poet. It was one thing to have one’s verses praised by a rural maiden like Nellie Kilpatrick or by one’s own admiring family; it was quite another to have them endorsed by a man of the world. Unfortunately Burns failed to name the poem Brown commended. At a guess it may well have been the two somewhat bawdy stanzas beginning ‘I murder hate by field or flood’, Andrew Dunlop’s manuscript of which was headed, ‘On the great Recruiting in the year 17— during the American war’. Burns had no motive for mystifying Dunlop; hence the date of these stanzas can scarcely be later than 1781, and Brown would have been more likely to applaud such lines than the conventional religious pieces more or less contemporary with them.
The good as well as the ill of Brown’s friendship belongs to the six or eight months at Irvine. If the friends met during the next four or five years, no references to their intercourse survive. When the Kilmarnock Poems were published, Brown received the only inscribed presentation copy on record, and in December, 1787, the two began a correspondence which lasted for a couple of years in the intervals of Brown’s voyages. Their only recorded meeting, however, was in Glasgow in February, 1788, when the poet told Brown all about Jean Armour. Burns’s last letter, in November, 1789, in reply to a complaint about his silence, is as cordial as ever, yet the friendship ended. According to tradition, Burns’s charge about Brown’s moral influence had reached the sailor, now a married man with a steadily improving position to maintain and far from eager to be reminded that he had heard the chimes at midnight. After Brown’s death, the presentation copy was found hidden away in the back of an old sideboard. The sailor was not the only friend who in later years wanted to live down his associations with the poet. The descendants of John Wilson concealed for more than a century the fact that instead of resenting ‘Death and Dr. Hornbook’ he appealed to Burns for help when his position as schoolmaster at Tarbolton became intolerable. On the other hand, James Humphry of Mauchline continued till his dying day to boast that he was ‘Burns’s bletherin’ bitch’.
During the same months in which Brown was stirring Burns to a new self-confidence his health was producing opposite effects. Throughout his life his diseased heart reacted unfavourably to nervous stress; the Irvine experience was the first of many. Realization of his bad bargain with Peacock combined with the unaccustomed strain of dusty indoor labour to bring on a period of ‘hypochondria’—in other words, nervous depression resulting from defective heart-action. Its tangible results were such lachrymose verses as the ‘Prayer in the Prospect of Death’ and the letter to his father in which he announces that he is ‘quite transported at the thought that ere long, perhaps very soon, I shall bid an eternal adiew to all the pains, and uneasiness, and disquietudes of this weary life; for I assure you I am heartily tired of it.’ The letter is not merely morbid, it is adolescent; and Mrs. Carswell has noted that the solemn announcement that ‘I am not formed for the bustle of the busy nor the flutter of the Gay’ is cribbed verbatim from The Man of Feeling. William Burnes, however, probably regarded it as admirable proof that his son was beginning to take serious views of religion and life. In any case it represents only a passing mood of ill-health. The important fact about the Irvine days is that Burns was considering seriously his own abilities and his future position.
The partnership had at least the merit of a dramatic and even spectacular finish. A New Year’s Eve celebration, whatever it may have done for Burns, brought his partner and his wife to such a state of drunkenness that they knocked over a lamp and set fire to the shop. The place was completely burned out, and after a month or two Burns returned to Lochlie poorer than he went, but with a rich store of experiences, a new outlook on life, and a mature confidence in himself which he had never before possessed. But he still lacked an aim. For another four years the pride which Brown had taught to flow in proper channels was still to display itself mainly in obscure rebellion against his lot in life, and in anything but obscure defiance of the unco guid.
The situation confronting him at home would in any event have matured him, but without Irvine it might have been in a different way. Firmly convinced as always of his own justice and rectitude—a conviction which he imparted with equal vigour to his eldest son—William Burnes was closing his long series of misfortunes in a violent contest with his landlord, David M’Lure. The dispute had begun in a difference over their respective shares of the expenses of liming and fencing the farm and erecting new buildings. Pending arbitration of the case, William Burnes had held up payment of his rent. In September, 1782, the matter was submitted to James Grieve of Boghead and Charles Norval of Coilsfield—chosen respectively by M’Lure and Burnes—for adjudication. When they were unable to agree, John Hamilton of Sundrum was chosen as ‘Oversman’ or referee. Not until August, 1783, did Hamilton complete his analysis of the accounts and hand down his decision, which was that of £775 claimed by M’Lure, £543 was offset by credits for improvements made by Burnes, part payments on rent, and other items. But before this decision was rendered M’Lure, whose estates were heavily mortgaged to the defunct Douglas and Heron Bank, and who desperately needed cash, had tried to force payment by entering a sequestration on the stock and crops of Lochlie. By the time John Hamilton reported, M’Lure was so deep in debt that it was uncertain whether the rent belonged to him or to his creditors. Thereupon indomitable William Burnes carried the case to the Court of Session at Edinburgh. His first petition being thrown out on a technicality, he renewed it, and at last, on January 27, 1784, less than three weeks before his death, won his case. He had had the cash on hand to deposit with the court, when he made his appeal, the whole amount due; the decision absolved him of further responsibility in the matter, and summoned the various claimants to bring in their claims for adjudication. William Burnes had vindicated himself; his view of his obligations had been upheld by the highest court in the land. All that it had cost him was the last of his money and the last of his strength. He was not an old man, but the long struggle for livelihood, culminating in the protracted lawsuit, made him the easier prey to tuberculosis. His conviction of his own rightness, like his irascibility, grew stronger as his body weakened, and mingled with his wrath at M’Lure was anxiety, bluntly expressed, over Robert’s growing defiance of Presbyterian decorum.
In calmer circumstances, his father’s displeasure would have weighed heavily on the poet’s mind, but now he was looking beyond it. Watching their father’s sinking health, the children were consulting with each other about their future. The end of Lochlie could not be long delayed: death would evict them, because after the litigation none of the claimants to the property was likely to give them a renewal of the lease. Though Robert subsequently gave Gilbert the credit of being a full partner in the next undertaking, he probably was not. It is difficult to imagine the timid and subservient Gilbert taking the lead in anything. Not long after returning from Irvine Burns had made the acquaintance of a prosperous Mauchline lawyer named Gavin Hamilton, who may have been attracted to the young farmer by reports of his outspoken ridicule of the Old Lights in the Kirk. Hamilton being also a Mason, they doubtless met first in the fellowship of square and compass. The lawyer, already in hot water with his more orthodox neighbours, may also have realized the potential value of Burns’s wit in the impending contests, but whatever his motives it was Hamilton who suggested to William Burnes’s children a practical and legal way out of their trouble.
Several years before, Hamilton had rented Mossgiel farm, about three miles from Mauchline, and had rebuilt the cottage as a country retreat. The plan of being gentleman farmer as well as lawyer had palled, and Hamilton now offered to sublet Mossgiel to Robert and Gilbert at a lower rental—£90 a year for 118 acres—than they were paying at Lochlie. The lease was quietly signed at Martinmas, 1783, it being apparent by that time that William Burnes had not many weeks to live. Secrecy was necessary; the Court of Session had not yet rendered its decision, and their action, if it became known, might be unfavourably construed. Whatever small savings had not gone for legal expenses were invested in the new enterprise, and Hamilton pointed out a loop-hole through which the children might salvage something after their father’s death. Robert and Gilbert were already credited with the regular wages of labourers. Let the other children also get themselves ranked as employees on the farm. Then they could enter claims for unpaid wages against their father’s estate, thereby becoming preferred creditors who must be paid in full before M’Lure or his mortgagors got anything. The scheme worked. Enough was saved from the wreck to enable the family, shaken and desperately poor—when the youngest boy, John, died in November, 1785, they could not raise the few shillings to pay for the best mortcloth at his funeral—to re-establish their household at Mossgiel, intact except for its head.
The new head was Robert, and in the months that followed his father’s death the full results of his Irvine lessons showed for the first time. In the two intervening years he had been too much oppressed with labour and anxiety to have time or inclination to show the new spirit in all its fullness, though he had shown enough to disturb his father. Now he was free, and the fruits of his freedom were varied and not always edifying. The earnest young debater of the Tarbolton Bachelors’ Club and the self-conscious author of essay-letters gave place to Rab Mossgiel. Burns became the focus for a group of reckless youngsters, most of them younger than himself, who looked up to him much as he had looked up to Richard Brown three years before. Foremost in the group were John Richmond and James Smith, both of them full of the animal high spirits which so often disguise the basic commonplaceness of young minds. Along with Burns they set out to scandalize the orthodox, and succeeded. By the end of 1785 Richmond and Smith, like Burns, had mounted the cutty-stool for fornication, and Richmond had fled from the turmoil to the comparative sanctuary of an Edinburgh lawyer’s office.
These cronies are chiefly noteworthy as evidence of Burns’s still uncritical mind. As with Bob Ainslie later, there was really nothing to them except youthful exuberance. Their laughter was the ready chorus for Burns’s wit; his sparkle made them shine with a reflected light to which they actually contributed little. By comparison the poor poetaster, Davie Sillar of the Tarbolton Bachelors, was almost a genius. In his characterization of Tarbolton townsfolk Sillar left behind him at least one quotable phrase, which is more than any of the Mauchline group did. They cannot be charged with leading Burns astray—if any leading was needed Burns supplied it—and their biographical importance is negligible except as they gave him an outlet for confidences which might not otherwise have been recorded. When Burns went to Edinburgh he lodged with Richmond during his first winter; during the second winter Richmond was in Mauchline a good part of the time. Burns’s last extant letters to him reveal some details about Jean Armour and her children, but lack the enthusiasm of the ones written in 1786. Smith left Mauchline to engage in calico-printing at Linlithgow. Failing there, he fled to the West Indies and died obscurely, as Burns came so near doing. Both friendships were spent and empty before the correspondence closed. The contrast between the mediocre abilities of the two men and the quality of the poetry they evoked from Burns is even more remarkable than the disparity between the illiterate farm-lasses of Tarbolton and Mauchline and the lyrics Burns addressed to them.
By the time he was twenty-six Burns’s status among people of his own rank was firmly established. He was the unquestioned leader of the reckless young; the welcome companion of ribald and unorthodox elders. The attitude toward him of the staid and sober ranged from sad head-shaking to violent denunciation. With people of rank above his own, however, he was still uneasy. Hamilton was probably the first man of the professional class with whom he formed a genuine friendship. John Mackenzie, the Mauchline surgeon who attended William Burnes in his last illness, remembered that on first visiting Lochlie he found Gilbert frank, modest, well-informed, and communicative, the father revealing the remains of an able mind beneath the cloud of illness and distress, and the mother quiet, sagacious, and self-possessed. But Burns sat glowering in a dark corner, ‘distant, suspicious, and without any wish to interest or please’; scrutinizing Mackenzie and obviously prepared to resent any display of superiority or patronage. As the doctor showed himself affable Burns gradually thawed. Though the written records of the friendship are meagre, Burns plainly liked and trusted Mackenzie, and Mackenzie reciprocated. From the time of their first meeting, the doctor declared, ‘I took a lively interest in Robert Burns, and, before I was acquainted with his poetical power, I perceived that he possessed very great mental abilities, an uncommon, fertile and lively imagination, a thorough acquaintance with many of our Scottish poets, and an enthusiastic admiration of Ramsay and Fergusson. I have always thought that no person could have a just idea of the extent of Burns’s talents who had not an opportunity to hear him converse. His discrimination of character was great beyond that of any person I ever knew....’ The surgeon introduced Burns as a poet to his own friend and patron, Sir John Whitefoord, who had previously known of the young farmer only as an earnest member of St. James’s Lodge; he also gave an introduction to Captain Andrew Erskine of Edinburgh, Boswell’s friend, and claimed to have been the first to bring the Kilmarnock Poems to the attention of Hugh Blair. It was to Mackenzie and not to Gavin Hamilton that Burns turned for very practical help in the stormy weeks preceding his final acknowledgement of his marriage to Jean Armour, and when Mackenzie provided Jean and her lover with quarters in his own house he must have faced a weight of criticism from the embattled saints and gossips of the village that would have daunted many a man with a professional status to maintain.